If A Bing Falls In The Middle Of The Forest...

Sometime around 9:30 last night, Bing disappeared off the internet for a half an hour, give or take. Our question for you: Did you notice?

Whenever a Google has a hiccup, even if it's not search, our tiplines are flooded. Twitter becomes an unreadable stream of complaining. The world, online, stops. Bing? Despite capturing about 10% of the search market, not so much. We got a couple pings in our tips page, and exactly zero emails. Which is odd! So let's theorise:

1. Bing users don't report outages to tech blogs, because they don't read tech blogs. They're using Bing because that's what Internet Explorer tells them to use
2. Bing users don't bother complaining; they just use Google for a half an hour. They're natural switchers anyway—they switched to Bing, right?—so it's not a big deal to shake things up for a bit. Google users, they're stubborn.
3. People don't feel so bonded with Bing, because it doesn't seem as central to their lives online as Google. Google apps—Mail, Maps Docs, Calendar, whatever—all live under the same umbrella, in the same rough interface, and under the same branding. Bing feels like its own thing to a certain extent
4. Shut up you jerk, I was utterly beside myself between the minutes of 9:24 and 10:07 PM EST last night, because of the lack of Bing.

Now you go! What will it take before Bing starts to feel, as depressingly as Google, like some kind of remote, digital human organ? Will it ever?

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